TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

A Terrifying Superbug Just Showed Up on a US Farm for the First Time

the only food security that is possible is through biodiversity. That is what our research should focus on. Any form of mono culture is a natural sitting duck waiting for the shoe to drop. Yet it is highly sustainable using organic practices that also uses supportive biodiversity.We have spent fifty years making agriculture highly productive but eliminating holistic thinking. What possibly could go wrong? Right now a single bacterial mutation makes the whole industry tremble. Throw in true biodiversity and no one would care. The bacteria itself would lack support and revert to a harmless strain.Practical biology is still in its rookie stage with too much impatience and foolishness passing itself off as science and change..A Terrifying Superbug Just Showed Up on a US Farm for the First Time

The bacteria found in a hog operation is resistant even to some of our most powerful antibiotics.

On Tuesday, researchers from Ohio State University published an alarming finding in a peer-reviewed journal: On a US hog farm, they found bacteria that can withstand a crucial family of antibiotics. Carbapenems, as they are known, are a "last line of defense" against bacterial pathogens that can resist other antibiotics, the paper notes. Worse still, the gene that allowed the bacteria to resist carbapenems turned up in a plasmid—small chunks of DNA found in bacterial cells. Plasmid-carried genes bounce easily from one bacterial strain to another, meaning that carbapenem resistance is highly mobile—making it more likely to find its way into bacterial pathogens that infect people.

"Infections with these germs are very difficult to treat, and can be deadly—the death rate from patients with CRE bloodstream infections is up to 50 percent."

To see whether carbapenem resistance is taking hold on US hog farms, the researchers settled on a 1,500-sow confined operation that follows "typical US production practices," which include giving newborn pigs a dose of an antibiotic called ceftiofur at birth, with the males getting a second dose when they're castrated at six days. Interestingly, carbapenems are banned from use in US farms. But ceftiofur is a member of the cephalosporin family of antibiotics, which kills bacteria in a similar way to carbapenems, and the authors speculate that those ceftiofur doses "may provide significant selection pressure" for the emergence of carbapenem resistance. They found it in swabs taken from the the surfaces of the farrowing and nursery pens.

Interestingly, the pigs don't get ceftiofur after those initial doses at birth, except to treat sickness. And at later stages of the pig-raising process, such as the finishing barns where pigs are fattened to slaughter weight, no carbapenem-resistant bacteria turned up. That's likely because the absence of ceftiofur "likely removed antimicrobial selection pressure" for the resistant gene, causing it to lose its niche. That absence of carbapenem-resistant bacteria in the late-stage pigs is good news—it means the superbug is "unlikely to have entered the food supply through contamination of fresh pork products."

But given how quickly the gene can jump from one bacterial strain to another, the study identified a ticking time bomb. Cephalosporins, the class of antibiotics that may have triggered the carbapenem-resistant bacteria on this particular farm, aren't administered nearly as much as other antibiotics on US farms, but alarmingly their use jumped 57 percent between 2009 and 2014, according to the latest Food and Drug Administration numbers. And the Ohio State study settled on one typical US hog operation. Who knows what's going on with the 21,000-plus others.

Over on the Natural Resources Defense Council blog, antibiotic-resistance expert David Wallinga notes that the bacteria that turned up in the Ohio State study is carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, "one of the nastier superbugs." He continues:

Infections with these germs are very difficult to treat, and can be deadly—the death rate from patients with CRE bloodstream infections is up to 50 percent. The CDC says these bacteria already cause 9,300 infections, and 600 deaths each year. To date, CRE infections occur mostly among patients in hospitals and nursing homes; people on breathing machines, or with tubing inserted into their veins or bladders are at higher risk, as are people taking long courses of certain antibiotics. But newer, more resistant kinds of CRE seem to be causing more problems outside hospitals, in communities and among healthier people.

Way back in 2012, the Obama administration introduced a new set of guidelines—that will finally go into full effect on January 1—designed to preserve antibiotics as a bulwark against dangerous infections by curbing their use on farms. As I show here, meat farms use about three times as much of these vital drugs as does human medicine. Yet the Obama guidelines are both voluntary and contain a huge loophole, which I tease out here. And now, even as terrifying superbugs continue appearing in the United States, we have a new president whose agriculture advisers have expressed nothing but hostility toward regulating food production.

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.